by Meg Wolitzer
She had known that the summer would end like this for her, that things could not keep going the way they had been. She had slipped out of the rhythm of the city, had awakened one morning and felt overwhelmed by the prospect of even getting out of bed. She forced herself to stand; it was too humid to lie there, and the room was too close. “The air was thick with its heat, and with my own,” she wrote. “Summer is a time when everything rubs against everything else. People seem to grate against each other when they touch, when they make love. The friction is too high, and I am losing my endurance.”
She touched the razor lightly to her wrist, like a wand, and a stripe of blood appeared. “There was hardly any pain,” she wrote, “not even the slight shiver and rush that accompanies a paper cut. I did my other wrist then, in the same way. I kept thinking of heat, of hopelessness. I looked downward and felt only surprise at seeing my own blood, nothing more.”
From down the hall there were sounds of people waking up. It was the heart of August, and Lucy was living in a tiny room in a Barnard dormitory. There were fifteen other students staying there for the summer, but she was friends with none of them. She fixed her dinners on a hot plate: cans of soup or Spaghettios. She worked as a waitress afternoons, and from carrying trays loaded down with dishes her arms had become muscular. They looked useless to her now, though, as she sat on the smooth tub edge. Blood left her quickly.
“I felt a quiver in my eyelid, a tic of fatigue in the midst of everything. I wanted to leave the hot bathroom. I thought about a play I had once seen in which Limbo is depicted as a large steambath, and I wondered if I was letting myself be sucked into Limbo, if I was fated to remain in the confines of the damp, airless bathroom for eternity. All my life I have felt closed off from everything—living behind a film of mist, and now I wondered if it was the same thing, even in death.”
Lucy stood up, as wobbly as the time she had given blood to the Red Cross. She slipped into her yellow bathrobe and left the room. Lines of blood forked down her wrists—she could even cup some in her hands. She felt truly faint now, and the lights dimmed, brightened, then dimmed again, as if an intermission had ended and the second act of a show were about to begin. Summoned, she made the few yards back down the hall. She fell onto her narrow bed and dialed University Health Services. She was sitting there, eyes closed, leaning against the headboard, when they came for her a few minutes later.
“My dark hair spread out on the pillow of the stretcher. This was pure softness now—the pale-green blanket they placed over me, the gentle way they tucked in the loose edges. The sharp sound of adhesive tape being pulled from a roll brought me up to the surface. As they wrapped my left wrist, then my right, I knew I would live, but somehow that knowledge was irrelevant. I was not even sure of why I had done it in the first place. It seemed just another action, another piece of business to fill a long day. I gravitate toward death, toward any kind of promise of a release from consciousness. I had an early memory then that sprang from nowhere. I saw myself as a pink, creased infant lying in a bassinet, with a big face looming over me. My mother, maybe? My father?
“Once my mother said, ‘We will always be here for you, Lucy,’ and I guess she meant it. That was the summer I stopped talking, though, and I knew that no one was really there for me, that I was on my own. The faces of my parents sometimes blend into one image—a kindly, ambiguous guardian face that can be seen from every angle, like the moon from a car window as you drive home at night. But unlike the moon, the face is there even when I close my eyes. It’s just out of grasp, and I find myself alone, as always.
“I have sometimes felt like an orphan. Once in a department store I became separated from my parents. A saleswoman approached me and asked if I had lost my mother. ‘I have no parents,’ I told her and watched as her face slowly changed. The words had spilled from me naturally, as though I were used to saying them, as though they were really true.
“It wasn’t that my mother and father did not love me, or don’t love me even now; they do in their own resigned, puzzled way. I was constantly aware of being separate from them, a foster child in an inappropriate home. I had figured out early that things would remain this way. There was nothing I could do, nothing I could touch. My childhood had no gravity. I floated dumbly through it, reaching out to grab for doorknobs, bedposts. I could not grab for people, because early on I would watch my father’s face, his lips moving slightly as he read the print of a huge marine biology text, and I could see that he was doing all he could just to be, and that nobody can really do any better. Until there is no longer the possibility of sadness, of isolation, there can be no gravity. We all float by, rootless, taking clumsy astronaut steps and calling it progress.
“My mother came to me in the hospital, clutching her red pocketbook and looking so out of place, so lost. She came and stood at the foot of my bed, just watching me. Someone cried across the big room; this was an adult cry, unlike the sounds of children I used to hear at night during that summer so long ago. A nurse whispered to my mother that I was stabilized, and this seemed so ironic that I smiled. I didn’t think I would ever be really stabilized. I had been given a sedative, and could feel its dull glaze start to move evenly over me. My mouth was loose and dry. I had nothing to say to my mother, and I hoped she would leave soon, go back to the beach, the only place she seemed to fit. Everything is grainy there, like the texture of a blown-up photograph. The ground is broken up into an uneven surface, like a page of Braille. Everywhere you walk there are tiny surprises—shell chips with their color bleached away, ridged Coca-Cola caps, the empty husks of men-of-war. Somehow my mother and father feel at home there.
“We used to dig for China. My whole family would burrow in the sand until we reached the depth where it became dark and wet, not like sand at all, and we could not dig any farther. That was my favorite part—the core of the beach—all of the graininess gone. Your fingers touch clay, touch a new, smooth plane. I imagined an underground world, a country where the inhabitants knew the beauty of the darkness, and weren’t afraid of it.
“‘Is this China?’ I would ask my parents. ‘Have we reached China yet?’
“‘Almost,’ they would answer. ‘Almost.’”
—
Helen’s skin had many acids in it, and every time she wore a silver or gold chain, she wound up with a fine black band of tarnish on her neck. According to her husband, this was a sure indication of royalty in the blood. She had always viewed it in a different way. When she observed herself in the wavy-glassed mirror above the sink, the band appeared more as a dissecting line, etched in a perfect semicircle directly above her collarbone. Cut on dotted line.
She thought abstractly of supermarket coupons. Lately she had been collecting these fragments of paper, shredding them from glossy magazines whenever she found them, even in the doctor’s waiting room while the receptionist’s hawk eye was focused elsewhere. It was not the redemption of these money savers that intrigued her, but the actual collection itself. She hoarded them, the way her husband, Ray, collected bivalve mollusk shells. Feverishly, as though on a scavenger hunt. It filled the hours; it was better than nothing. “Just so I don’t have to think,” Helen had said to a friend once. “That’s all I ask for.”
It was winter in Southampton, and the ocean was choppy and looked darker than ever. Helen was stewing tomatoes and onions in the kitchen while Ray read an oceanography journal.
“Do you want to drive into East Hampton to a movie tonight?” he asked. “They’re showing Kramer vs. Kramer.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “Whatever you want. You know that none of that matters to me.”
Ray sighed and closed the magazine. He placed his hands flat on the kitchen table. “There’s nothing I can do to make you feel any better, is there?” he asked.
She did not answer him.
“Maybe you should go back to see Len Deering. He would put you on those antidepre
ssants again if you asked. They seemed to help you last time.”
“They just masked things,” Helen said, “and they made me fat. I couldn’t fit into any of my clothes, and I just sat and cried all day. Remember? Nothing can really help.”
Ray stood up and put his arms around her. He did this at least once a day, as though to remind her that he was still there, still concerned, still grieving along with her.
They went to the movie after dinner, driving in silence. Ray put on the radio, and static came in. There were no really good stations this far out on the island. Snow was starting to fall again. It had been snowing sporadically all evening, stopping every hour or so as if for a breath. Helen used to think it always looked so beautiful when it snowed on the ocean. The flakes landed and settled themselves for a moment, before disappearing under the surface.
As they walked down the aisle of the theater, scanning the rows for two vacant seats near the front, a few people watched them, then looked discreetly away. Helen pretended not to notice. She held on to Ray’s arm and they kept walking. During the movie he leaned over and whispered into her ear, “How long can we continue like this?” It was not a new question. He asked it periodically and she always replied, “Until we drop dead.” He squeezed her hand hard. Their running dialogue had become a sort of private joke between them.
Friends used to tell Helen that eventually she would start to feel better, that one day out of the blue she would wake up and begin her morning without thinking of her daughter. She believed this for a while—clung to it, in fact. One day, she thought, she would indeed get up and feel refreshed from her sleep. She would start teaching again. She would set up the badminton net on the beach and they would play for hours. She’d cook jelly omelettes for herself and for Ray, and they would both sit at the table and discuss the lectures they would be giving in their sections that day.
When one year had passed, Helen knew this would not happen. She felt no better. There had been no major change. Friends ceased to be so optimistic about her state. They telephoned less often; they couldn’t bear to hear her cry anymore. There was something almost unnatural about overly long mourning periods, something almost indecent.
Helen turned her leave from teaching into an early retirement. She stayed at home each day, sitting out on the back porch overlooking the water.
“You shouldn’t let your child become the focus of your life,” a psychologist had told her and Ray many years earlier. This had seemed like unrealistic advice. What did he know? He was not even married, this expert. He knew nothing about what it meant to have a child.
Some people had it easy. Some people could just drop off their child at an expensive summer camp in the Poconos and then knock around Europe by themselves until the close of the season. When they returned they could simply retrieve their daughter, who would be bronzed and happy and voted Best in Dodgeball.
Not so with Helen and Ray Ascher. They had spent their time worrying and consulting professionals. Lucy had always seemed a space apart, locked in some very private world. She was overly sensitive when she was little; if you sneaked up behind her and tickled her, she jumped and turned very pale and could not be consoled for hours.
“Where did we ever get her?” Helen used to say when Lucy was a child. It was as though Lucy had fallen from a star, so different was she. And then, when she was twelve, she had simply stopped talking for two months. They had never understood what went on inside her. In junior high school Lucy began to write poetry—complicated, elegiac things that neither Helen nor Ray could really grasp. The child of two marine biologists, two lower-power academics—two serious, practical people out on the windy tip of Long Island—was a poet. Go figure that out, Helen thought.
“You’re a poet and you don’t know it,” Ray used to say to Lucy, chucking her under the chin.
They never knew what she thought of them. Did she think them simple, unartistic? When she received an award from the New York State Council on the Arts, she had thanked them in her speech. Helen and Ray had sat in the front row of the auditorium, bewildered and proud. Helen’s pumps had felt tight and all wrong. She had been wearing sandals for years now on the beach and loafers in the classroom.
Sometimes crazy thoughts went through Helen’s head. Maybe Lucy was put on this earth for some divine purpose. Maybe she and Ray were not Lucy’s true parents, maybe they were just the facilitators of her birth—she the mortar and he the pestle, as it were, grinding up and preparing the ingredients of this spectacular creation.
After Lucy killed herself, Helen found that she often thought about Lucy’s conception for some reason, trying to remember it in minute detail. She didn’t know why she had latched on to this, but she could not stop thinking about it. Lucy was conceived while Helen and Ray were spending a weekend in Southampton. His Aunt Mary had died and left Ray’s family her summer house. “You kids might as well use it,” Ray’s father said. “You’re young, enjoy it.”
They drove out to the beach every Friday and stayed until very late Sunday night. They almost couldn’t bear to go back to Brooklyn. “This is where we really belong,” Ray said, and he was right. Later, when Southampton College opened, they both got faculty positions, and Helen made the move from the city to the beach with ease.
But it was those early days, when the house was theirs only during the weekend, that Helen remembered most clearly. One Saturday in 1954, as Ray was about to leave the house and spend the day exploring the area, Helen stopped him in the hallway. “Wait,” she said shyly. “Would you like to go back to bed for a little while?”
Ray stopped and put down the bag lunch she had packed him: a sandwich without the crusts, cut into neat triangles, a nectarine carefully checked for scars and soft spots, and a thermos of coffee, black as pitch. They did not go into the bedroom but made love right on the warped wooden floor of the hallway. The salt air had made the whole house buckle.
Ray smiled over and then under her, smiled as she moved her hips to his. Just as in formal dancing, here she would never take the lead. She would never initiate a rhythm; she always left it up to him. This control seemed to frighten Ray, but somehow this fear must have been arousing. He placed his hands on her bottom, and pulled her up to him frantically. It was an action that might be taken by a person waking up to a house full of fire—a survival action, pulling a lover or child smack against his body as they wove their way through a thicket of flames.
Helen had wanted very much to conceive. They had been trying for months, and after they made love that morning, she lay flat on her back on the floor, her hands on her stomach. “Oh,” she said suddenly.
“What is it?” Ray asked in a worried voice.
“I just felt something,” she told him. “Inside me, moving around. Like the beginnings of a baby, I think.”
He laughed at her. “That’s ridiculous.”
“No,” she insisted, “I think this time it really worked. I actually feel pregnant.” An image flitted through her mind: a microscopic fetus, its proportions minnowlike, almost all head and eyes, sucking its thumb somewhere deep inside of her. Ray laid his head down on his wife’s stomach, listening closely for signs of life.
—
Are you ever happy?” Helen had asked her daugher once, when Lucy was eighteen.
“What do you think?” Lucy answered. Helen never brought the subject up again.
Lucy’s poetry matured early—long, graceful poems that were accepted by small literary magazines. She went off to Barnard, but she did not get much out of it, and she dropped out after three semesters. “The education’s too narrow,” she said. Helen did not know what that meant. She only knew that Lucy was a rarity, and that she needed to be left alone. Sometimes, though, she had to be fished up by her parents.
She had first tried to kill herself when she was eighteen, spending the summer living in a hot Barnard dormitory, working as a waitress in a Beef ’n B
rew by day and writing poems long into the night. Something had come unstuck, and Helen received a phone call from a doctor at Columbia Presbyterian, telling her that Lucy had slit her wrists and was in the hospital.
Ray was out on a sea expedition that day, and Helen took the train into the city by herself, feeling as if she might faint at any moment. At the hospital Lucy’s room was large—a ward, really, with freshly made beds, hospital corners tucked in meticulously.
Lucy was over by the window, lying flat on her back. Helen came and stood by the foot of the bed, unable to think of anything right to say. She had trouble collecting her thoughts at all. She just shook her head slowly and said, “Lucy.”
Lucy did not say anything but sighed heavily and moved a stray strand of hair from her eyes. Helen looked around the room helplessly. The woman in the next bed was watching the scene with rude interest. She leaned her head on her hands and stared very closely. She was a round-bodied woman with an equally round face. Helen turned away and knew that she was going to cry. She dug in her purse for a tissue and wept silently into it for a while.
“What’s she crying for?” the woman asked anyone who would listen. “She thinks she’s so special. What’s she crying for?”
“Listen, I have to go,” Helen said to Lucy all of a sudden. “God, I’m sorry, but I have to go. I’ll be back tomorrow, with Dad. We can talk then.” She leaned over to kiss Lucy, then she left. She walked out slowly, looking at all of the women in their beds. Lucy was by far the youngest; she was a child, really.
Television sets flickered soundlessly, showing anonymous women winning prizes on game shows, screaming their hearts out and yet not making a noise. The women in the ward looked doped-up and tired, as if they were just now coming to the surface after anesthesia. In this room, where nurses paced the floor like night watchmen in the bleak hours, lay fragmented women. They were women who did not resist the jab of a needle that would send them into a false sleep. At eighteen, Lucy was one of them.